A General Purpose Software Toolkit for Robot Control and Application Programming

Over previous Phase I, II, and III NASA SBIR projects, TRACLabs has created a software toolkit forprogramming and controlling humanoid robots and other mobile manipulators. This open-source toolkit,called the CaRtesian-based AFfordance Template Suite for MANipulation (or CRAFTSMAN), incorporatesstate-of-the-art motion generation techniques along with principles of user interface design and softwareengineering to fill a gap in the robotics research community for advanced sensor-driven applicationdevelopment. While this toolkit was initially supported by NASA, further support from a large-scaleautomotive client and robotics manufacturers has allowed TRACLabs to mature the code-base for itsdeployment in industrial and commercial contexts. Despite this commercialization success, the capabilitiesof CRAFTSMAN motion control have mainly been focused on a small set of robot-independent trajectorygeneration algorithms, and the deployment of the system has been limited to classes of manipulation taskswhere goals can be represented as spatial waypoints for the robot’s end effectors or navigation systems.It is the goal of this work to refactor CRAFTSMAN into a more general plugin-based control framework that supports techniques for advanced motion planning, reactive control, and automous stance location. We argue that this refactor would be beneficial by providing a common application programming framework that can be used on multiple systems in a variety of environments, and where new functionality can quickly be integrated to facilitate a number of NASA-relevant missions. We call this next generation of out toolkit CRAFTSMAN++.